By Charles Fensham, c. 2019, Journal of Pastoral Publication Inc.
– Book Review by Kathy Vandergrift
“A fresh gospel inspired way of discerning the boundaries of healthy sexual relationships.”
Harm is not a secondary issue for the discussion on how we relate to LGBTQ+ persons. It needs more attention now in the face of renewed threats to the dignity of any person who does not easily fit in traditional categories of male and female. Dr. Charles Fensham helps readers take harm seriously in his book, Misguided Love: Christians and the Rupture of LGBTQI2+ People. He offers helpful analysis and alternative grounding to find a better way forward.
The basic thesis of Dr. Fensham’s work is common sense. Non-affirming Christian teaching causes harm. He provides evidence of that from history, research, and personal experience. Its basis in Scripture is ambiguous at best, as he carefully explains. At the same time, there is no basis in Jesus’ gospel message for causing this harm. A scriptural moral logic, then, calls for confession of harms done and finding a new Biblically-based, life-giving ethic that allows sexual and gender minorities to flourish together with the whole Christian community.
Dr. Fensham, a Presbyterian pastor, theologian and Professor Emeritus at Knox College at the University of Toronto, shows deep love and respect for the Bible, the history of Christianity, and other Bible scholars in his careful attention to traditional thinking. He responds with respect to possible objections to his careful reading of what the Bible calls us do do at this moment in the redemption story. This book is helpful because it addresses aspects that are not often covered extensively in other books on this topic.
The role of shame and disgust in Christian history is explored in detail, as well as a brutally honest account of how much Christian teaching contributed to abuse, exploitation, and violence against sexual and gender minorities. His careful examination of “love the sinner – hate the sin” approaches, including a critique of Preston Sprinkle’s book, explains why they are harmful. That is particularly relevant for discussions in churches who say they are welcoming but hold to traditional theology. A “welcoming but not affirming” approach traps people in a double bind of conflicting, coercive messages; this “form of moral manipulation” about one’s deepest identity, he argues, leads to guilt, shame, and the self-harm we see and will continue to see until harmful teaching stops. Rather than dismissing damage done with a lame apology, Fensham puts harm prevention at the core of theology and practice.
To ground a new approach that takes the whole Bible seriously, Fensham turns to the ethical framework of Nicholas Wolterstorff to integrate justice and love, and to Margaret Farley’s A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. Sexual and gender minority people have a right to be treated with dignity that allows human flourishing, including intimate, covenantal relationships within the larger family of God. This is not “anything goes” as often alleged. Fensham provides Biblical grounds for discerning between sinful erotic relationships and faithful, covenanted relationships in ways that apply to both the more common heterosexual relationships and non-heterosexual ones.
The book provides rich material for thought and discussion, as a reward for working through a more scholarly text. For those who struggle with the harm caused by what their church teaches, this book provides a positive way forward that takes both the Bible and harm prevention seriously.
It is never too late to learn and change how we follow Christ today.